Letter to Thyatira
Pastor Zach Pummill • July 12, 2020
Sermon Overview
REVELATION 2:18-29
Jesus’s letter to Thyatira was to a tolerant church. They had allowed Jezebel to operate among them and lead people within the church to sexual immorality. No one addressed her and cast her out. This letter perhaps more than any other, shows how deeply just knows his churches, their struggles, and their sins.
Sermon Transcript
Hi boys and girls, here and at home I've got a challenge for you. As you listen this morning, I want you to draw a picture of worship, but there's a catch. It can't be a picture of anything that happens inside this building on a Sunday morning. What does worship look like outside of church in your life? I'd love to see what you come up with if you draw. And any parents as well.
And so this morning we come to this letter to Thyatira, and it's the fourth church that we're looking at. And Thyatira was said to be the most unremarkable of all of the cities to which these letters were written. Thyatira was an industrial city. It was a blue collar town, it was filled with tradesmen, it was filled with craftsmen. And most likely as blue collar towns tend to be, they probably had a deep sense of community where they looked after one another. They cared for one another. They relied upon each other to meet each other's needs.
And so, certainly that culture probably fed into the culture of the church. It's probably where we get what Jesus says in verse 19. "Jesus commends them in extraordinary fashion." Listen to what he says. He says, "I know your works, your love, your faith, "your service and your patient endurance." That's quite a list. Who doesn't want to be a part of that church? Five things. He says, "I know your works, your love, your faith, "your service, your patient, endurance." And the language that Jesus is using here, He's describing a church that's an outward-facing church. They're a witness bearing church because they are loving and serving their community in the name of Christ.
And Jesus goes even further and He says that your latter works actually exceed the first. They've gotten better at it. They've grown in these very ways which if you remember from four weeks ago, it's the complete opposite of the church in Ephesus. They were a church that felt that love was no longer a necessity. And so for here in this Thyatiran church love is on full display. But just as well, unlike the Ephesian church, they were not faithful at rooting out false teachers. And so, as can so easily be the case there were areas where their love had begun to turn into tolerance. And tolerance is what happens whenever love is divorced from law.
If you look at verse 20, Jesus says, "But I have this against you. "You tolerate that woman Jezebel. "This woman who claims to be a prophet is among you "and all she's doing is seducing my people "into practicing sexual immorality "and eating food that's sacrificed to idols." Now we look at that list, we look at those two things and we easily say, "Of course, those things were bad. "They should stop doing them "that's why Jesus is telling them this." Well, of course they're bad things, but if we just look at it that simply then we're gonna miss the point because Jezebel's temptation in this church is very nuanced. It's a very powerful temptation. And it's actually something that you and I are tempted with all the time.
And so, there's a lot more that's going on here beneath the surface and so we're gonna have to do a little heavy lifting to understand this context that Jesus is speaking into so that we understand what Jesus is trying to say. And so in particular we need to consider the ancient Roman world and what were known as guilds. A modern way of thinking about these guilds is that they were essentially what we would call a worker's union. Thyatira is a union town. It's the Rust Belt of its region. And each of the trades, the brick masons, the pot makers, the clothing makers, the artisans, each one of them had their own guild. And since Thyatira is an industrial city, then these guilds would have been all over the place. And so these guilds were where you did your business. These guilds were where you network. They were how you landed that next contract. It's where you'd make connections and you'd hire more workers. This was the system within which you grew your business.
But these guilds were also places where there was rampant sexual immorality, debauchery, gross sin of every kind and idolatry because each of these guilds had a patron deity. And part of participation in membership in the guild meant that you had to pay homage to these patron deities and engage in these acts of pagan worship. So there'd be sexual immorality by visiting a certain district in the city after a late night at the pub with those in the guild or be attending these lavish parties filled with excess of every kind where there would be meat and food that was sacrificed to idols for you to be blessed and you to be strengthened by the gods themselves. And it meant that you had to pay your tribute. You had to pay your tithes, your offerings and support the work and existence of the guild.
So, if you put all of that together, what about that sounds like an easy situation? Because what do you think would happen if you didn't participate? You'd be marginalized, you'd be ostracized by the trade, you'd be rejected by the community because you weren't on the team. Which meant that you wouldn't get the contracts and you wouldn't get the work. Which if you didn't get the work then you wouldn't get the money. So we're dealing with a situation in which non-participation in these guilds meant nothing less than potential financial destitution for these people.
And so Jesus is talking about a lot more than just, "Hey, stop doing those bad things." He's fundamentally putting them to a question to how they will choose to go about their own welfare and their own sense of well being. And so if you just imagine for a second, how much social and economic pressure these Christians had to feel? You want to make it? You got to play the game. There's no other way around it. It's just how the world is. You can imagine that at many points in their life they would feel powerless within this circumstances.
And I said at the beginning of these letters that in each one, Jesus's goal is to move these churches to a place of maturity and growth. That they would become more and more like Christ as his people. And so with this church in Thyatira, what does it mean for them to begin to move towards maturity in this situation? What does that actually look like? Well, Jesus is trying to bring them to a deeper maturity by giving them a larger understanding of worship. He wants them to have a deeper, richer sense of what worship means and all of its implications for life because this church had fallen into the trap that we can so easily fall into ourselves where we minimize worship.
And so, even though unintentionally we minimize it by essentially thinking about it like this, where worship is essentially that one hour a week where I go to church with my church family. And so when that happens worship gets minimized. And when worship gets minimized and inevitably what happens is we start to compartmentalize it. And we compartmentalize it and it becomes separate from the rest of life. And so we think, "Hey, I show up on Sunday morning, "I sing praise and honor God for who He is." But that reverence for God doesn't carry into the rest of the week. God doesn't bear weight and pressure on the way that we live in all the other arenas and avenues of life. And so, all that means is that worship becomes a box that gets checked instead of the very manner in which we are called to live our lives.
The Bible only presents a view of worship that is comprehensive. The implications stretch into every aspect of your life. It presents a scenario in which worship assumes that there's no arena or avenue or section or corner of life over which God has not spoken what is good, right, true, valuable and virtuous. There's no area of life where God is not the most dominant factor in how you live. And so it doesn't present a view that as long as you participate on Sunday mornings, by and large God is pretty well satisfied with that and you can live however else you want the rest of the week.
So if we think about this church in Thyatira, Jesus is moving them to a place where they can understand a deeper definition in reality of what worship is. And He's moving into a deeper understanding of worship by helping them to recognize that it includes two important realities. Worship includes a social dimension and worship includes an economic dimension. And so, there's a social dimension because worship includes how we view and how we relate to others. There's an economic dimension because it includes how we understand and use our wealth and our resources. Worship under God's definitions of it include a social and economic dimension.
And that may seem a little bit abstract to you this morning. But let's just step back for a second and think about how God set this whole thing up in the first place whenever he rescued Israel out of Egypt.
He rescues them, they cross the Red Sea, He defeats Egypt and they immediately move to Sinai where God begins to what? He begins to tell them about what it means to be His people. And the first thing that He tells them is that worship of this God is rooted in his desire for a loving relationship between them. The foundation of worship is that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. And so this invitation to worship this God fundamentally changed Israel's story because through it, God is telling them, "Egypt called you my slave, but I call you my son."
Worship provided a categorically fundamentally different relationship in a whole new identity for this people. And so God sets the foundation of worship. And then right after that, what does He do? He gives the law. And so, if we look at it through that lens then it means that the law is essentially nothing less than codified love. The law is the love of God in the form of law. Because this is how God is telling them, "This is how you will be my people "and this is how I will be your God."
So then, if you actually begin to look closely at those laws, what do you see? You see social and economic implications of worship of this God and how it extends into all of life from top to bottom. The social implications of worship are all over the place. The social fabric of Israel is built on the command to love your neighbor as yourself. And it's mandated through all of these laws throughout the Old Testament. There's economic laws about wealth and debt and the amount of debt and just profit that you can make over and against someone else. It mandates mercy and compassion financially for others. Of the gleaning laws where the social and economic dimensions come together. These gleaning laws where a landowner could not harvest their entire land because they had to leave some for the poor and the sojourner among them. There were laws that required someone to move the boundaries of their property so that somebody who'd fallen on hard times might have a little more to help them get through those hard times. Worship in reverence of this God cannot be separated from a social and economic conscience.
Just listen to this one law for instance. Just one law from the book of Leviticus and see how all of this comes together. Leviticus 25:35: "If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner and he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest nor give him your food for profit. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God." That's just one law where all of this comes together.
So what would make an ancient Israelite think that they could compartmentalize worship and say, "Yeah, I can worship God and not follow some of those laws. Yeah, I can still worship God and use my money how I want. I can decide how I want to treat my neighbor and still revere the Lord my God." It's actually God tells the complete opposite. He actually says, "You will engage socially and economically with your neighbor in this way, why? Out of your fear, out of your reverence for who I am and because of what I have done for you."
Worship of this God requires a social and economic conscience. And so, if you put all of this together, you have to ask, what was the purpose? What the purpose was so that Israel would be a holy people completely set apart from the rest of the world. They would operate differently than the surrounding world and through that they would bear witness to who this God was and what He was like. His character, His nature. Social justice wasn't invented in the 1900’s despite what you believe to this day. God has always presented the most radical, beautiful picture of humanity over and against any and all other options. Why? Because He is the Lord our God.
The problem is Israel rarely did this. They barely ever scratched the surface of becoming that kind of people because they constantly got in trouble time and time and time again through tolerance and accommodation. They repeatedly tried to blend worship of God with trying to be like the other nations, which meant what? That meant they adopted the social and economic practices of the surrounding nations. And so they started to oppress one another and enslave one another. And justice was traded for injustice. Compassion gave way to rampant corruption. They hoarded resources, they became power hungry, they forgot about the poor and they made them even poorer. They spent their resources elsewhere all while trying to pretend that they were living as this special people of God yet all the while that they were going about these social and economic practices, they were showing and revealing exactly what they thought about this God they thought they were serving.
So if we start to inch back towards our passage this morning, this is exactly what we see with Jezebel in the Old Testament. The very Jezebel that the Jezebel in our passage received her namesake. Jezebel was the queen of Israel in the northern kingdom. She was a Phoenician woman. She was a foreigner that married King Ahab and she introduced all sorts of new practices. She introduced the worship of Baal and Asherah into Israelite culture. And she deceived them into pursuing these gods in the middle of an incredibly severe famine and in the middle of an economic crisis. And she convinced Israel that they needed these gods in order for their provisions to be met. They needed these gods to bring rain and restoration to the land.
And so, with this new worship came new social and economic practices. Jezebel used royal funds to create and support a whole new priesthood devoted to Baal and to Asherah instead of using those resources and funds to feed her starving people. And she stole money from supporting the priests of Yahweh to give it to the priests of Baal and Asherah. There is profound social and familial disruption because she's teaching the entire kingdom how to engage in sexual immorality to worship Asherah and all the fornication that that meant. And you might think a little bit here and there, "Hey, every culture has it." But just to show you how bad it actually got and how widespread and pervasive these practices were, there comes a point where God tells Elijah that there's only 7000 people left in the entire kingdom that haven't bowed a knee to Baal. Out of the entire kingdom there's only a small remnant. And you can imagine the spiritual darkness that fell across the entire kingdom because of these new social and economic practices of this new kind of worship.
And the people of God were all too willing to adopt them and be deceived. Why? To escape hardship, to get out of suffering, to seek provision.
And so in this letter to Thyatira, Jesus is saying that this prophet that is seducing them is no different. She is just another version of Jezebel. She's deceiving them into participating in the practices of these guilds and engaging in these new social and economic practices in their day that are in the end completely antithetical to a life of worship that Jesus calls them to. And remember, this is happening inside the church, not outside the church where it's easy to point a finger at. So, she was deceiving them with what? She was deceiving them to accommodate. She was deceiving them into thinking that I can worship Jesus over here while still engaging in these guilds and all that they require.
And again, the people in these churches were quick to believe her and be deceived. Why? To avoid hardship, to escape suffering, to seek provision.
You can imagine what some of that deception sounded like. You can imagine what some of that justification looked like and what that thought life was like within the minds of the members of these churches or of this church. I think things like: "I have to. What choice do I have? If I don't participate then I won't get the work. And if I don't get the work then how could I provide for my family? And if I don't participate then I'll be rejected by the community. And if I don't get the work then how would I have any money to be able to give to the church? Certainly God understands this is just a necessary hoop that I have to jump through. This is just the way that things are. This is just the world that we live in.” I'm sure they justified it in all kinds of ways.
And the deception was to accommodate and to minimize the life of worship by separating God from the social and economic spheres of life where they could think that they could have church-life over here, and they could live the rest of life over there. And yet in doing these very things where they're now destroying the very witness within the very spheres that they were called to have. Their situation isn't really that much different than us in our day.
We too are tempted to minimize a life of worship by accommodating in the social and economic spheres of life. And when that happens, does it not communicate what we believe about the Lord our God despite our attendance on Sunday mornings? We're tempted all over the place.
For instance I talked to someone a long time ago about how they used to work for a large investment firm. And it was a dog-eat-dog culture. An incredibly competitive culture within this investment firm. And it was an unspoken rule that if you looked at the partners, all of them essentially were on their second, third and fourth marriage. And it was was presented as a badge of honor. "Look at how much they gave up for the firm. "They're on the team. "Everything else came second to the firm. "You see, they're all in. "They want what's best for the firm. "They're putting their own life second "for the sake of the firm." And so this person already felt pressure all the time coz they were on their first marriage. And always kind of made them feel like, "You on the team? Are you really a part of what's going on here? Do you need some more work? Do you have enough to do?"
In particular the firm wouldn't pay for a divorce, but if someone was going through a divorce they get a month off and then they'd maybe get a bonus check in the mail. Hey, you handle business. You take care of what needs to be taken care of so that you can come back and jump headfirst back into the firm. And so, what does that mean for someone in that situation to think about advancing in that place of work? How's that for social and economic pressure? The justification that well, if I do go up, they'll think about what I could make and think about how much I could be a blessing to others.
I talked to someone just two weeks ago that in their place of work there are these months where they have celebration months throughout the year. And one of those months is Pride Month. And it's typically the managers and the overseers that put all the celebrations on and host all of the events and all of the parties. And this person in particular is a manager. They're an overseer, and thus far they've been able to avoid participating because it goes against what they believe. And yet they said quite frankly they know that the day is quickly approaching whenever they will have to make a choice. Will they participate or will they not? They're looking at having to find another job and perhaps another career in the midst of making a stance on their belief system. That's economic and social pressure.
Or maybe you feel it in your workplace, maybe it's on a work trip. You get the co-workers and your colleagues together and there's just a culture of excess visiting certain places, joking and talking in a certain way. And you feel to some degree like you've got to participate coz if you don't, you don't want to look like you're not on the team. You don't want to get on the bad side of what everybody thinks about whether or not you're invested in the company and you want to have opportunities for advancement. And you're trapped between a rock and a hard place amidst the social and economic pressures of your job. Or maybe there's partners that like to be wined and dined in a certain way and you got to land the contract.
Or maybe it's not even in your job. Maybe it's just in the social spheres of the community where you have relationships with other moms or other dads or other men and women in your neighborhood where when you get together, there's just this culture of negativity. There's just this culture of complaining about husbands and wives, griping about kids, complaining about how the world isn't the way they want it to work. There's gossip, there's backbiting. And it's always about the person who couldn't make it that particular week. Or there's just a lavish spending and bragging about the excesses of life. And there's this pressure to keep up with the Joneses and you feel like if you don't participate then you'll be rejected and ostracized by the very people that live in your neighborhood.
Make no mistake, we're tempted to accommodate all the time for the same exact reasons to avoid hardship, to escape suffering, to keep from being rejected. Or we accommodate for self promotion and personal gain. And we think that we have to do it with inside the system that we're in and we have to play the game. And we can make compromises and in the end we bear no witness to the Lord our God, to the surrounding world because we engage those social and economic spheres of life no differently than they do. And really at the root of all of this, is it not stem from a deep distrust in the Lord? We're tempted to accommodate what God says is good and true and right and holy and valuable because we don't think that He will sustain us.
It's hard to be faithful to what God would call us to because we think that part of our self-preservation, part of us being preserved and provided for means we have to play the game of the system. We have to compromise those values if we are going to get by. And we feel like we have to play the game because if we don't, God will not provide for us in the end. And Jesus is telling the churches that that is not true. It's not even remotely true.
And He invites them to see their situation from a different perspective. And so what does He give this church in Thyatira? Which means, what is He giving to you?
Very quickly He gives him three things: The first thing is He gives him a vision of what he had done in the past. And verse 18, it says that He has eyes like flaming fire and feet like burnished bronze. He's using language that came from a vision that God gave Daniel of this heavenly champion that would provide for Israel whenever they were exiled in Babylon and existed in a foreign and hostile culture that was constantly begging them and forcing them to bend those values and adopt the new social and cultural practices of Babylon. And it was this heavenly champion with eyes of flaming fire, with feet of burnished bronze that provided for his people whenever they were faithful time and time again.
He provided for Daniel when he fasted and yet he thrived physically more than anyone else.
He provided for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego when they were thrown into a fiery furnace and they walked around and yet they were not burned.
He provided and preserved Daniel whenever he was thrown into the lion's den.
He's using this language to remind them of the one who is with them. He is one that sees his people's desperation. He knows exactly the circumstances that they are facing and He invites them to trust in Him to provide for them nonetheless. And He's saying, "Instead of looking at that institution "or that system to provide for you, "how about you remember what I've done? "And how about you try me instead? "Will you trust me?"
And secondly, He gives them comfort. He says in verse 24, "To those that haven't followed Jezebel," he says, "to remain strong." But then He says what? He says, "I'm not gonna lay any more burdens on you. I'm not gonna heap any more burdens upon you." And some of you need to hear that comfort this morning. Jesus is not out to get you. There's a goal for your life is not to make you suffer as much as possible so that He can humble you. He is not looking to burden you. He is not looking to overwhelm you. He's the God who sets free not sets in bondage. The problem is that our definition of freedom is different than His definition of freedom. And He invites you to trust in Him.
And lastly, He gives promises. He says, "To the one who conquers incredible things." Listen to this and it's directed to you. "To him I will give authority over the nations "and he will rule them with a rod of iron. "Even as I myself have received authority from my Father, "and I will give Him the morning star."
Now, after reading those promises, the best thing that a preacher could do is to tell you this, "I have no idea what that means. "None whatsoever." What's it saying in the Greek? "We still don't know. "It doesn't clear anything up." Who could possibly put these promises into words and understand them? What does it mean to rule over the nations in the eschaton with the rod of iron? What does it mean to rule over all peoples and be given the same authority that Christ himself has been given? What does it mean to be given the morning star? No clue. Let's remember and be quick to remember that no eye has seen, no ear has heard nor heart of man imagined what God has in store for those who love Him.
But I do know this, that what this communicates is what the Bible says so clearly elsewhere, which essentially is this: Is that the only thing that Jesus will not completely absolutely 100% share with you is his divinity. Everything else He shares with you fully and completely and you are a co-heir with Christ. In light of all that He has in store to give you, why would He not preserve you here and now and in the future? Will you trust Him?
Jesus reminds them of the past and what He has done, He comforts them in the present, and He gives them hope for the future. But in the end the passage boils down to the simplest age-old of questions. Will He truly provide if you put your trust fully in Him?
Two weeks ago we started the campaign to raise $32,000 to support the 6,400 families in the deep forest and families in Kolkata. $32,000 to support them in the midst of everything going on for the month of July and August. And as of today we are over halfway there at $17,000. July is taken care of and we're already into August. And praise God for that, right?
But in light of today's passage, let's look at it from another angle. Imagine someone going to one of those 6,400 families, just one of them. One person going to one of those 6,400 families six months ago, and that person came to them and said, "Hey, I want you to know that six months from now you are going to experience some of the hardest times of your life. Calamity is going to fall upon the deep forest and calamity is going to fall upon you. Hard times are coming. But I want you to know that on the other side of the world in a city that you'll never visit, there's a church that you've never heard of, filled with people that you'll never meet. And in the course of two weeks, they will give more money than you will make in your entire lifetime. And they will support 6400 families in the deep forest. Why? Because their God is one who has eyes of flaming fire, feet like burnished bronze. He gives the stars as gifts. He gives the universe as an inheritance. And he operates by a fundamentally different economic and social structure. And he's going to invite them to be faithful. Why? So that He might reveal how faithful He actually is.”
Now, what on earth about that story makes it sound as though He will not provide for you?
Will you be faithful? And will you trust Him?
To those who have ears to hear let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
